The field of communications has become increasingly important in today's society. In particular, the ability to quickly and effectively interact with an individual (through any suitable communications media) presents a significant obstacle for component manufacturers, system designers, and network operators. This obstacle is made even more difficult due to the plethora of diverse communication technologies (e.g., Instant Messaging, cellular communications, simple voice sessions, etc.) that exist in the current marketplace.
As new communication technologies become available to the consumer, new protocols need to be developed in order to optimize this emerging technology. One problem that may be encountered occurs when one endpoint requests a communication session, using secure media, with another endpoint that does not support secure media. This often results in the communication session failing to be connected because the two endpoints do not agree on the type of media to use for the call. Furthermore, it may be the case that the call will not fail until after a user of the non-secure endpoint has picked up his handset or otherwise answered the call. Thus, the user of the non-secure endpoint may answer his ringing phone only to hear an error tone (e.g. a tone generated in response to a BYE message).